Mold apparatuses are critical to modern industry. One set of designed mold apparatuses can be used many thousands of times to manufacture thousands of products. However, when the mold apparatus is badly designed, it can affect the quality of the products produced.
It is known to all that mold apparatuses can be used in hot molding processes and cold molding processes according to temperature of molding materials. A ‘hot’ molding process means a process for manufacturing molding products, during which the materials to be manufactured are heated to be molded, and then be cooled to released from the mold. Typically, a mold comprises a bottom mold and an upper mold separating from each other at a mold-assembling surface.
Referring to FIG. 6A, which is a schematic, cross-sectional view of a conventional mold apparatus used to manufacture an optical lens 30a as shown in FIG. 7A, the mold apparatus includes a bottom mold 10a and an upper mold 20a, which must be assembled compactly along the mold-assembling surface. Thus two opposite surfaces of the optical lens 30a with good homocentric degree and coaxial degree could be obtained. When the bottom mold 10b and the upper mold 20b become mis-aligned during assembled, as shown in FIG. 6B, shifts will occur to the axes of the two opposite surfaces of the optical lens 30b obtained thereby, as shown in FIG. 7B. When bottom mold 10c and upper mold 20c are divergingly assembled as shown in FIG. 6C, divergence will occur to axes of two opposite surfaces of optical lens 30c obtained thereby, as shown in FIG. 7C. That is, homocentric degree and coaxial degree of two opposite surfaces are improper.
However, optical lenses are usually used as critical components in optical systems. If faults as described above in FIGS. 7B˜7C cannot be efficiently controlled, qualities of optical lenses will be badly affected and serious errors will occur in the optical systems.
At the same time, in actual industry, molding portion of a mold apparatus, that is, a molding core, will be manufactured separately and then be used as an upper to a pre-selected standard mold base. The molding core and the mold base are usually assembled in interference fit shape, thus assembly error will affect accuracy of the molding core, and further affect quality of optical products.
Therefore, a heretofore-unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies associated with mold apparatus.